6 comments

Very good.
If you don’t have some kind of rational proposition you have no start point for an idea. And you give the buyer no ability to rationalise the purchase (which I have heard described as a functional alibi).
BBH’s brilliant launch commercial for the Audi 100 “If you want to be on the beach before the Germans, you’d better buy an Audi” is a great case in point. The values (slightly mocking humour, brilliantly realised) were made relevant by the product proposition.
However I do question your assertion that ad blocking comes from the public getting fed up with blandness of execution. Surely it has more to with unpleasant foot in the door direct marketing tactics that feed off inappropriate surveillance. I don’t want Google snooping my emails so that they can sell my data on…

As much as I respect Dave Trott I think the exact opposite has occurred. Using his analogy I’d say it was all lettuce and no mayonnaise. The reason ad blocking has increased so dramatically is advertising’s descent into the world of logic, legal arse covering and the need to get right, absolutely right every time…no risks taken, no inspiration followed. In other words it has negated it’s role as an entertainer and now dithers around as some vapid educator embracing a ludicrously PC world, inhabited by a multi-cultural overkill that’s squeezing the very life out much of it’s product. l won’t ‘back in the day when I was in the business as a writer’ but things were very different then, advertising was watched because it was entertaining, often times more entertaining than the programmes it appeared in. Advertising was a water-cooler conversation but now, because so much of it is just a bore, that the conversation has become Ad blocking and how to achieve it. Bring back strap lines, bring back jingles, bring back ABM, amongst others, and get rid of the creative carthorses with bloody degrees and no discernible talent. Advertising has been subsumed by the wishes of clients and their tedious political agendas. In today’s climate, the Cinzano ads would never have been made, nor the BT classics or Smash or many hundreds of others because they weren’t the product of ‘getting it right…absolutely right…one hundred percent right every time’ NO, they got it seventy eight percent right and let twenty two percent fly and it was that twenty-two percent that saw them fly. The public aren’t fools, stop treating them with contempt and they’ll stop treating your 30 seconds of creative glory by blocking it. My solution would be to double -up on the mayonnaise and double down on the lettuce but throw in a few walnuts just to add a little extra crunch. Over to you Mister Trott or anyone else who cares to engage.

It’s the relentless tide of ‘re-targeted’ crap offering desperate deals on stuff you’ve either bought already or decided against buying at all. Being stalked and nagged isn’t going to change your mind either way. The targeting may be absolute precision, but the effect is total alienation.

To your broader point, how did we manage to do such a poor job of educating the current generation of marketers and ad people? Or do they really think technology has changed everything and the basic principles of human communication no longer apply?